Is this worth it? Should I bother? At what point does the “low” in “low-art” stoop so low it no longer justifies serious analysis?

In Bad Grandpa, Jackass daredevil-cum-actor Johnny Knoxville, under a thick layer of makeup and prosthetics, plays a disgusting geriatric who goes on a series of drunken adventures with his 8-year-old grandson.

The incorrigible Irving Zisman (Knoxville) gets his penis caught in a vending machine, cracks onto young women and is wheeled around in a supermarket trolley as his dead wife gradually decomposes in his car trunk.

Unsophisticated sight gags have long been a staple of popular comedy. Watching Charlie Chaplin destroy the scenery in a film like City Lights, smashing into things and pouring alcohol down a fat man’s pants, reminds us that when it comes to brainless laughs nothing much has changed.

With a risqué single purpose movie such as Bad Grandpa (the purpose: make ‘em laugh make ‘em laugh make ‘em laugh), appreciation inevitably comes down to a question of taste and to matters concerning “the line.” What it is; whether it is crossed; how often it is thrown up on.

For the record: yes, Knoxville and director Jeff Termaine (a Jackass alumni) cross it, but Bad Grandpa isn’t without a sense of art. It is styled with faux DIY aesthetic, as if indie rabblerouser Harmony Korine (Trash Humpers, Spring Breakers) left a home video out in the sun. The rhythm is fast and slaphappy. There are plenty of good punchlines for audiences willing to go along with it.

It’s refreshing to see Knoxville’s shtick redirected by Termaine, from reality TV dross milked to death in Jackass toBorat style pranksterism. You wouldn’t exactly call Bad Grandpa a measured reveal of a complicated personality, but a surprisingly strong sense of character lies at the heart of it.

Zisman is a preposterously inauthentic creation, but something rings oddly true of his foils and follies. In this sporadically hilarious off-colour comedy, stupid, misogynistic America is skewered by a paradoxical creation: an actor young and reckless enough to raise hell and a character old enough to know better.

As if prompted by Oliver Stone’s cartel-themed drug drama Savages, in which Benicio del Toro gulped down co-star Blake Lively’s saliva and later likened it to fried chicken, fellow Hollywood heavyweight Ridley Scott breaks bad with another star-driven sun-baked story about dodgy deals and gnarly repercussions.

The Counselor is set on the Tex-Mex border, with Michael Fassbender headlining as a lawyer known only by his eponymous title. It’s unclear whether the language with which he is regarded — “hello Counselor,” “goodbye Counselor,” “thank you Counselor,” “‘scuse me Counselor — is intended to mark an Eastwood-like man with no name, duty bound and purpose driven, or is being used for ironic reasons.

Then again a lot is left willfully unclear in the debut screenplay of Cormac McCarthy, writer of Pulitzer-winning post-apocalyptic walkabout novel The Road and the literary source of the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning manhunt drama No Country for Old Men (2007).

McCarthy’s agents expected him to hand in his latest novel and instead the 80-year-old author turned in a script, which Scott snapped up and attached a bevy of stars including Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz.

In hindsight that moment provided an early indication there was something big-headed about The Counselor from the get-go, a my way or the highway cold-shoulder towards template drama that makes it into the finished product and then some — from its protracted opening pillow talk scene in which Cruz asks Fassbender to go down on her, ironically set underneath virgin-white bed sheets, to the wonky threading that connects its characters and plotlines.

Details of a $20 million drug deal that piques the interest of the Counselor and sees him sweating and scheming on the opposite side of the law are nebulously defined. They involve the co-operation of two clients: a cowboy middleman played by Pitt and Bardem’s gabby playboy, whose wild eyes, perpetually in search of marching powder or a dance floor, swirl in circles from behind rose-tinted shades and below a mat of spiky electric hair.

Bardem is ice cool, a magnetic performance that sends his oily bisexual charisma from Skyfall (2012) swinging into a more atavistic setting, collecting sparks along the way. A sense of danger and uncertainty hangs around him. We don’t know what this man is capable of or can confidently gauge his motivations. Pitt’s ghost-who-walks character is similarly vague.

There’s a gonzo sense of madness to the story’s architecture. Not in the way that word tends to be misused — as a synonym for druggy, hallucinogenic and wild — but in the sense McCarthy has assigned himself, or at least his ego, a central role in the narrative. Audiences will doubtlessly be put off by an ambivalence towards orderly writing and structure. At least some of the film’s appeal comes from Cormac evidently wanting to take the piss — and Scott putting his eyes up to the test tube, trying to make sense of the sample.

There’s a clear peak to the delirium, a high-water mark from which The Counselor’s follies can be put into perspective, and it’s a show-stopper. We watch a spread-legged Diaz have intercourse with a convertible, the astonished glint in Bardem’s eyes passing on more than a complete vision of this “cat fish” moment ever could. Cronenberg; Crash; heart out; etc.

A terrific conversation between Fassbender and a world weary Mexican gangster who disappears as quickly as he arrives, some kind of tequila-scented harbinger of death, hints at what the film is about: the horrible task of coming to terms with how one’s destiny is being written in the brief window before the book is snapped shut.

As Fassbender’s glum protag finds himself over his head in murky unknown territory, there is a sense the production around him is also treading in risky waters, thrusting itself into situations Scott and McCarthy regard with little obligation to resolve. That synergy is weird and oddly wonderful. The answer to The Counselor’s riddles are obscured behind a weird-ass poker face that’s readable if you want it to be, and impenetrable if you don’t, or can’t, jive with the film’s whacked-out sense of self-importance.

There are too many superhero movies! Hollywood is infantilising audiences! These days directors care more about action figurines than real characters!

Take a deep breath. Relax. And shut up.

While teenagers and young adults continue to inject windfalls of cash into the film industry — literally buying bucket loads of popcorn and snacks and investing heavily in ancillary markets such as VOD, DVD and video games — the argument continues that Tinseltown is pumping out way too many salt-burn superhero pics that are way too similar.

Before we go further, let’s clarify two things. First: that argument is more or less right. Second: it’s almost always made by people outside the genre’s target demographic.

In addition to the intended audience and those who would never step foot into Thor 2: The Dark Age unless their glasses fogged up and they accidentally veered into the wrong cinema to discover Captain Phillips has a massive magical mallet and Tom Hanks sure looks good for his age, there are two other primary audiences. They are the “had a long week” crowd understandably lured by the promise of spectacle and escapism, and those dragged in by association (parents, guardians, aggravated partners, emergency response teams, etc).

To the first group my advice is to stay away from director Alan Taylor’s sequel about a thespian-voiced Summer Bay lookalike with a huge hammer (not a euphemism) and a humourless one-eyed version of Anthony Hopkins for a father. It’s drab, bloated and stuck together with special effects that look like high-end Microsoft screensavers. To the second group, my commiserations.

Chris Hemsworth reprises his role as the titular “Mighty Avenger” who battles to save Earth against “the Nine Realms.” If “the Nine Realms” sounds to you like questionably thought-out back-story hokum spun with spiffy fantasy/SCI-FI vernacular, you’d be right. And that’s before we factor in words such as “Malekith,” “Odin” and “Asgard.”

A meaty opening prologue — such is the cookie cutter template for a self-important multi-world fantasy picture such as this, riddled with uninteresting histories about chequered dynasties of the yada yada yada and so forth — is tacked onto a story that switches between Earth and the orange-hued SFX-stuffed planet our hero calls home.

Earth has Natalie Portman, playing superhero accessory and “scientist” Jane Foster. The latter has vast CGI backdrops, otherworldly locales and strange gnarly beasts. Through a jerry-built plot contrivance those beasts spill onto Earth, a symptom of a wider problem: the team of writers can’t seem to decide which universe to settle on so they settle on both and neither.

The film wraps itself around each world as delicately as a slap band landing on a fat hairy arm and the resolution, from a writer’s POV, is a perfect storm of idiocy: characters, beasts and random objects cross through portals connecting “this world” and “the next” like a goofy souped-up version of Sliders, with Jerry O’Connell presumably face-planted somewhere between realities, wiping white fuzz off his face.

Occasionally Thor: The Dark World writes itself out of tragedy by inhaling a pinger of fish out of water comedy — i.e. Thor catches the train and Thor hangs his hammer on a coat rack. But even by the generous allowances afforded to superhero shenanigans, if this is the kind of storytelling pass-carded by critics, may God have mercy on us all.

One wrote that “Chris O’Dowd is great comic value,” neglecting to mention he appears in just two short scenes separated by an hour and a half of running time. The same critic described Natalie Portman as “highly decorative and suitably feminine.”

Suitably, sorry, what? Does that mean Portman looks like she’s on a diet of salary (ho ho) and chickpeas and spends the lion’s share of the movie either gazing longingly at the alpha male of her dreams or waiting obediently for his return?

Hanks’ name appears in bright red letters above the title. Its colour-matched to the words “based on a true story” which sit below a clump of squashed credits naming cast and crew, including the person who directed it: Paul Greengra-something-or-other.

It’s not his name that matters. “From the director of The Bourne Ultimatum” carries more currency with mainstream plebs and PR bootlickers, a line that hints at the old Hollywood dictum that you’re only as good as your last picture (or the last one the general public remember you for).

Likewise, theCaptain Phillips one-sheet is a fitting example of how movies are marketed these days. This flick was made by a guy who made this other title you’re statistically most likely to have seen — if you haven’t you at least recognise the brand (it’s Bourne, B.O.U.R.N.E.) — and stars an actor who brings with them celebrity baggage and loosely defined audience expectations.

In this case it’s Tom Hanks and his famous everyday man shtick, a nice fit with the film’s workman-like title. That’s a shtick the 57-year-old actor has carefully cultivated through a range of performances in which he worked hard to prove he could have been your brother, your dad, your uncle or your neighbour, and not a power-wielding Californian charlatan rich beyond your wildest dreams.

But no matter. Hanks is very good as Phillips, captain of a huge cargo ship boarded by Somali pirates in the Somali basin who desperately tries to keep cool while his crew hides in the engine rooms below like panicked animals: silent, scared and weapon-less.

The point is how a thoughtful upper crust Hollywood dish such as this is packaged for the proverbial back row, the people who whoosh past billboards and posters at bus stops and think “hmmm, maybe” and the seed is planted.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing if it brings audiences to a quality film they may not have otherwise seen. That logic explains the casting of Hanks in the first place. He’s both the salesman and the porter, the door opener for a coke-and-popcorn populace who could just as easily have wandered into some other cinema and seen a different movie advertised with another famous person’s mug on the poster.

If the gear turners in the movie marketing biz assumed consumer knowledge and weren’t driven to seek the quickest and most effective shorthand, the poster for Captain Phillips would have touted Paul Greengrass’ shuddering 2006 terrorists-on-the-plane 9/11 drama United 93 rather than his Matt Damon franchise pic. Not because United 93 is Greengrass’ best film (which it is) but because it most closely fits what viewers can expect when they board HMS Hanks.

Adapted from a memoir, A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS and Dangerous Days at Sea, the film is visceral and unsettling, a victim of its own sea sickness. It’s shot with the kind of shaky-cam that sends David Stratton convulsing into the night, awakening in cold sweats to curse the ease with which today’s filmmaking yoof (Greengrass is 58 but no matter) disregard the time-old tripod.

Captain Phillips‘ aesthetic is vintage Greengrass: cinema of the moment with a festering voyeurism so insular it barely seems to exist beyond the boundaries of the frame. That “you’re here” feeling is what makes United 93 so terrifying.

Greengrass’ grasp of verisimilitude in Phillips is shaken only by the casting of Hanks, who brings with him elements beyond the director’s control. Having deliberately recruited no-name actors in United 93 (as well as non-actors rekindling real-life roles) to heighten its realism, there’s no doubt Greengrass knew what he was losing by hauling in Hanks’ hefty shoulders and what the film’s exterior reality (marketing, box office, buzz etc.) would gain from them.

They say politics is the art of compromise. Given the intensely collaborative nature of the cinematic medium and the many creative sacrifices made on the road to the red carpet, few directors would argue the same doesn’t apply to their trade. Movies with no-name actors rarely win major Oscars, such is the nature of Hollywood’s beloved star system, just as posters without famous faces rarely make it to bus stops and billboards.

The movement of 40s and 50s crime films from which the neo-noir genre inherited its name is mostly populated by rapidly sequenced 90-or-so minute pictures, their distinctive aesthetic rarely taking priority over the progression of a story.

Not so in writer/director Ivan Sen’s outback NSW-set Mystery Road, which, though it might look like a western, is structured like noir.

The death of a teenage girl (in older films, she would likely have been missing rather than murdered) propels Jay Swan (Aaron Pederson) to investigate. The Indigenous detective sticks his nose into places it doesn’t, as they say, belong, his gruffly obstinate matter-of-fact methods getting both local authorities and locals themselves off-side.

Diazepam pacing means the clock turns slowly as Swan’s investigation suggests the existence of hermetic crime networks. Sen’s sun-baked visual style — one part Japanese Story (2003), two parts Wake in Fright (1971) – stops to smell the roses, if any could grow in the dusty locations his characters seem to grudgingly inhabit.

Pithily phrased conversations flow with a prosaic rhythm and an admirable if dramatically lax sense of realism. Swan’s inquiries may get him leads but the focus is very much on his journey and its sometimes grisly outcomes.

During rare moments of direct confrontation, even the bullets in Mystery Road travel slow. Characters shoot and wait, peering into the distance to see where their shots land, and it’s as if the entire energy of the film is encapsulated in those short pregnant pauses between trigger and impact.

Oblique in its intent and without the complexities of an investigatory film along the architectural lines of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Mystery Road broods and simmers. The performances are tight and introverted — in the lead role, Aaron Pederson is unshakably measured — and its backdrops vast and sparse.

Despite an increasing significance in the story, Hugo Weaving’s character (a member of the drug squad) is almost as unreadable at the end as he is at the beginning, and the film is similarly close-mouthed. It’s like his act is one big poker face, his life an impenetrable card game.

Sen, who directed the linguistically fascinating 2011 Indigenous drama Toomelah, staggers dramatic escalation in service of a slow burn, aiming to build tension and pack the pressure valve before eventually lifting the lid.

On this level Mystery Road is a mild success. The finale, however, disappoints. Sen’s gear stick remains lodged in the same position, as if it were stuck by all that sun and sweat.

If you could go back in time whenever you liked, introduce yourself to the object of your affections again and again and keep refining your pick up moves until eventually this person fell for you, does that make you a romantic or a creep? Is it true love or an elaborate manipulation?

The protagonist in About Time, the latest syrup-lacquered rom-com from Love Actually and Bridget Jones’ Diary writer/director Richard Curtis, discovers at age 21 that if he retreats to a quiet place and clenches his fists he can zap himself back to the past and relive any moment of his life.

Father and mentor Bill Nighy advises him not to go crazy. Keep your goals modest, he says, correctly inferring the story about to unfold will not be the stuff of Sports Alamanacs, DeLoreans and tricked-up phone booths.

But boy, Tim Lake’s (Domhnall Gleeson) goals really are modest. He just wants a girl friend and is prepared to tolerate (even with the limitless gifts afforded to him) a mundane day job so he can come home and snuggle up to the gal of his dreams. That gal is Mary (Rachel McAdams) who falls for him, but in a sense never really had a choice. Is Tim being selfish or selfless?

There are several interesting moral and logical questions posed in About Time. Curtis is prepared to answer precisely none of them for two reasons: he doesn’t care for that whole science fiction thing and won’t tolerate painting his protagonist in a negative light, even temporarily.

Like Tim’s aspirations, About Time is modest. Curtis has made a fluffy middle of the road rom-com and his attitude seems to be that if viewers are lured in by a time travel twist, so much the better. That twist provides an enjoyable quasi-intellectual exercise, provided you don’t think about it much. There is a smattering of “whoops, rewind that!” jokes that work well and give the film a slight edge, albeit an edge Curtis is entirely uninterested in exploring.

Whether this is a virtue or a vice largely depends largely on your expectations. As a rom-com About Time is a reasonable success for unfussy audiences. It’s good-natured and thoughtfully constructed, with a flabby middle act and a cheesy finish.

As a time travel movie it doesn’t offer anything remotely innovative. When it looks like it might, Curtis quickly aborts mission.

In Howard Suber’s screenwriting textbook The Power of Film, the UCLA lecturer argues there is no such thing as an antihero. Instead, there “are only characters who act heroically and those who do not.”

If we watch a person drive down a street, see a house on fire and run inside to rescue an elderly lady, we naturally bestow on them the status of a hero. If we watch a person drive down a street, see a house on fire, and respond by looking at their watch, grumbling and racing off to an appointment, he or she is not an antihero (so the logic goes) but simply a person who is not a hero yet.

That argument begins, if not to unravel, then certainly to enter far muddier territory when a character performs an otherwise unconscionable act because they believe it is in service of a wider moral imperative; muddier still if that moral imperative may not be obviously the “right” one. In other words, if a person believes they are doing awful things because they are acting heroically.

In Prisoners, a superb American bone-chiller from Quebec director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies), desperate god-fearing Pennsylvanian carpenter Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) decides to take the law into his own hands.

The case is personal: his young daughter and the daughter of close friends are missing, presumed abducted. The primary suspect seems guilty enough: a creepy RV owner (Paul Dano) with the IQ of a 10-year-old. Whether or not he’s the perpetrator turns out to be one of Prisoners’ least interesting questions.

A two-and-a-half hour opus of suburban horror that moves from a familiar “every parent’s worst nightmare” MacGuffin into a complex quilt of awful secrets made worse by decent people trying to make sense of them, Prisoners touches on domestic violence, obsession, the mentally ill, ethics of vigilantism and religious perversity.

Shot by 10-time Oscar nominee Roger Deakins, the film has a damp and eerily beautiful look. It rains a lot and the sets and characters seem to exist in a thick winter chill.

Places and emotions exist figuratively and literally behind walls, underneath floors, stashed in boxes and buried in the ground. Many of the people who populate these places are driven by complex sets of competing motivations.

Whenever you think you have the story pegged, Prisoners evades expectations. It’s a terrific reminder how good it feels to watch a genre picture and have no idea where it will be in 20 minutes. If the film starts off like Taken, it evolves into something architecturally more like Chinatown (1974), its twists and turns planks in a complexly arranged network of events.

Hugh Jackman seems headed towards emotional territory certain to over-extend his limited dramatic reach; having cut his teeth on the stage, the former Boy from Oz is yet to master the subtleties of a nuanced cinematic presence. However, his character affords him cause to be gruff and barky, and Jackman’s loud acting is offset by quieter performances from Jake Gyllenhaal (as the detective attempting to put all the pieces together), Paul Dano, Melissa Leo, Terrence Howard and others.

Prisoners’ expertly written screenplay, completed in 2007 by Aaron Guzikowski (who wrote it while working full-time at an advertising agency), simultaneously shifts logical and moral boundaries, so the core mystery evolves along with the mystery of how to read the players inside it. Fake-outs, callbacks, twists, reveals and recurring motifs are unraveled with an almost galling flair.

For years it was one of Hollywood’s most famous unproduced works. At various points Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio were poised to star. A regular complaint was that the script was too bleak. Indeed, you won’t see a star-driven Hollywood picture much bleaker than this.

But “bleak,” as Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption might like to put it, can be a bullshit word. As Prisoners demonstrates, it isn’t an antonym for “enthralling” or “entertaining.”

Prisoners is both, and more: a nerve-rattling achievement in dramatic storytelling and one of the pedigree thrillers of 2013.

Prisoners’ Australian theatrical release date: October 17, 2013.

]]>http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2013/10/19/prisoners-movie-review-trapped-in-mazes-of-moral-murkiness/feed/1Win a double pass to About Timehttp://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2013/10/18/win-a-double-pass-to-about-time/
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2013/10/18/win-a-double-pass-to-about-time/#commentsThu, 17 Oct 2013 21:24:54 +0000Luke Buckmasterhttp://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/?p=30854About Time is now playing in Australian cinemas. Cinetology has 10 in-season passes to give away, valid nation-wide. ]]>

At the age of 21, Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) discovers he can travel in time… The night after another unsatisfactory New Year party, Tim’s father (Bill Nighy) tells his son that the men in his family have always had the ability to travel through time. Tim can’t change history, but he can change what happens and has happened in his own life-so he decides to make his world a better place…by getting a girlfriend. Sadly, that turns out not to be as easy as you might think.

]]>http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2013/10/18/win-a-double-pass-to-about-time/feed/0‘Where the fuck were you?’ Interview with John Landis, director of The Blues Brothers & Three Amigos!http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2013/10/16/where-the-fuck-were-you-interview-with-john-landis-director-of-the-blues-brothers-the-three-amigos/
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2013/10/16/where-the-fuck-were-you-interview-with-john-landis-director-of-the-blues-brothers-the-three-amigos/#commentsTue, 15 Oct 2013 21:50:44 +0000Luke Buckmasterhttp://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/?p=30691The Blues Brothers, Three Amigos! and Animal House -- pulls no punches. ]]>

John Landis is speaking to me from the back of a car in Melbourne, whizzing between meetings, interviews and public appearances. The 63-year-old Hollywood legend’s gatekeepers tell me he doesn’t have much time.

Anyone whose listened to the anecdote-armed comedy doyen understands, however, that in the Landis universe there’s always time for stories. And I get hit with a deluge.

Rattling off jokes, quips, expletive-laden commentary on the movie business and an assortment of name-dropping tales (the one involving John Belushi and a New York Times film critic is my favourite) Landis is firing on all cylinders. Twenty minutes later, he shows no signs of slowing down. I’m not even sure the car is moving.

In town for the Melbourne Festival, which is running a retrospective of his work, Landis’ directorial CV includes mega hits such as The Blues Brothers, Three Amigos!, Animal House and An American Werewolf in London. These are all considered classics. This, I learn, is a word Landis regards with bittersweet amusement.

“In the United States critically I was always a bit of a shmuck. They hated me and yet the pictures did well,” he says. “It’s funny because the same critics now refer to many of my films as classics and role models. I think well, where the fuck were you when they came out? They’re the same movies!”

In recent interviews Landis has spoken colourfully (it’s hard to imagine him speaking any other way) about the risk-averse nature of studio financing.

“It’s always been called the movie business. Not the movie craft,” he says. “So it’s critical to talk about the state of the industry. It’s a strange time but the business is evolving. They’re much less diverse, the multinational corporations.”

But when I suggest the media has painted him as a kind of quasi Howard Beale, rallying against corporate bullshit and studio scuttlebutt…

“There’s this weird thing where people are saying I’m the doom and gloom guy. I’m not! I’m optimistic about the movies,” Landis says.

“I complain like everybody else. These days it is more difficult to make more challenging movies, put it that way. My biggest concern is not genre films so much as I hate that so many people will see Lawrence of Arabia or 2001 on an iPad.”

Despite Landis’ insistence that he isn’t the doom and gloom guy, our conversation veers more than once into the business end of tinsel town. In Hollywood the flavour du jour is – and has been for some time – superhero movies and sequels (often they’re the same thing).

Superhero movies, while enormously expensive, are low-risk investments. They are marketed towards teenagers and young adults, who need the least convincing to get out of the house, buy prodigious amounts of popcorn and snacks (which are far more profitable for exhibitors than the films themselves) and are more likely to invest in ancillary markets such as DVD, merchandise and video games.

But Landis, who has pulled no punches expressing his thoughts on Hollywood’s infatuation with superhero pictures (and knocked back an offer to direct Thor) is reluctant to finger a particular type of movie.

“I have no trouble with the genre. Now, when you make films, the marketing is so extensive they often open a picture in Shanghai and Buenos Aires and Melbourne and Rome and Moscow at the same time. So you want a film with broad international appeal, and superheros are a natural fit.

“Listen, I think Dick Donner’s Superman is a wonderful movie and I loved Sam Raimi’s Spiderman. So you can still make a good superhero movie. My son wrote a film a few years ago called Chronicle, which was extremely original.”

Landis says he’s “not interested” in making sequels but doesn’t clarify whether his critically maligned Blues Brothers 2000 was one of the movies that (as he puts it) he “did for the money.” He reminisces about it in the manner of a lover reflecting on a relationship that didn’t work out, or was doomed from the start.

“The new head of the studio hated it, didn’t want to make the movie and kept putting obstacles in the way. I think the screenplay was rewritten 17 times. They did everything they could to make us say ‘go fuck yourselves.’

“One of the reasons we made it was because B.B. King gave me so much shit about not being in the first one. He called me every two weeks: ‘when are you putting me in the god damn movie?’ I don’t regret it mainly because the music was so good. Just throw on that CD.”

Blues Brothers 2000 may have been pooh-poohed by critics, but if Landis carries a grudge against the notepad-wielding, star-granting, beard-scratching brigade, he doesn’t show it.

“The worst a critic can do is hurt your feelings,” he says. “The only true test of a movie is time. A picture likeThe Wizard of Oz, that’s fucking brilliant. And it’s as brilliant in 2013 as it will be in 2060.

“What I dislike intensely are the ten best or five best lists. Or those lists like ‘the hundred greatest.’ I think that’s a masturbatory exercise.”

As for the story about The New York Times film critic and John Belushi, it concerns a review Landis read in 1981 of An American Werewolf in London.

“She ended it (the review) by saying the film doesn’t work because – this is a direct quote – of ham-fisted screenplay and direction by John Landis,” he says.

“John Belushi called me up and said ‘did you see The New York Times review?’ I said yeah. He said ‘did you fuck her?’ I said no, but she certainly fucked me.”